On 23rd August 2023, Chandrayaan 3 made a historic landing near the south pole of the Moon. The nation’s pride stands on the shoulders of the engineers who designed, built and flew Chandrayaan. Would you like to be one of these engineers?
Engineering products pervade society, make our lives easier and better. We cannot imagine life without electricity, the internet, and smartphones. Soon, electric vehicles will supplant petrol/diesel vehicles. How could you become a part of the next technological revolution that transforms society?
What is an Innovative Engineer?
The above examples each use technology to benefit society. This is what engineers do. Each of these examples is also an unusual, innovative application of technology. The people responsible for these marvels of engineering are Innovative Engineers.
Innovative engineers identify problems in everyday life and use technology to deliver solutions to these problems that are much better than those that exist. They think out-of-the-box. The majority of students who graduate with a Bachelor in Engineering or Technology (BE or BTech) degree in India are not trained to be innovative engineers. Many of them take up routine jobs or leave engineering altogether. The lucky few get jobs in companies that build products and learn innovation and real-world skills after several years on the job.
In a nutshell, engineering consists of 4 steps.
- Identify a need of society.
- Design a solution using technology.
- Implement the solution.
- Deliver it to customers and ensure their satisfaction.
An Example:
Students in Govt College of Engineering, Tirunelveli, TN decided to tackle the problem that a bike helmet is unpleasantly hot in summer. They designed a helmet with a Peltier module that uses electricity to cool the inside of the helmet. They built a prototype. As the first customers, they used the helmet while riding their bikes. Thus, they did innovative engineering while in 2nd/3rd year in college.
Air-cooled bike helmet, GCE Tirunelveli
How do I become an Innovative Engineer?
The good news is that you too can become an innovative engineer during BTech. Engineering combines science, technology with a healthy dose of common sense. In BTech, you will study many science and technology subjects. These are important. Equally important is to gain common sense through practical experience. In countries that lead in producing technology products, such as the US and Germany, young girls and boys tinker with gadgets at home, in school and in college. Most Indians grow up without this experience.
You can make up for this deficiency during your BTech to become an innovative engineer. Your college may have technical clubs where you work hands-on with technology. These include programming clubs, automotive clubs, etc. When you participate in these clubs be sure that your gadget is useful to some customers. They should use it and give you feedback.
Four 4th BTech students at IIT Mandi identified a need: planning a solar panel installation on a house required a tedious and costly manual inspection of the roof. They designed a novel automated process using image processing of satellite images. When they graduated, they started their own company The Solar Labs to take their product to customers. Four years later, their startup was bought by a leading solar panel manufacturer for a large sum.
Programmes such as LEAP provide students the opportunity to conceive, design and implement useful products during BTech.
An Example:
A team of LEAP students in Govt Engineering College, Idukki, Kerala decided to make a robotic feeder for elderly and persons with disability. They designed a sleek robotic arm that scoops up a spoonful of food from a bowl and raises it to the lips of the user. It has proximity sensors to control its movement.
RRobotic feeder, GEC Idukki
To become a good innovative engineer, start practicing today:
Identify, Design, Implement, Deliver.
My interest is ML, why study Chemistry?
You might wonder why the BTech curriculum includes subjects such as Chemistry. They may seem irrelevant to your aspirations. Technology changes rapidly. Until 2000, only a few academic geeks were interested in ML (machine learning), no one got a good job by knowing ML. Today, ML is hot. In 5 or 10 or 20 years, during your career, ML will drop from the list of skills that working professionals need. Chemistry may well be the hot field at that time!
ML utilizes advanced statistical models with large amounts of data to gain intelligence about problems ranging from global warming to medicine to sports to precision agriculture. Good ML is 10% statistics, modeling and coding – which many students learn – and 90% domain expertise. Most ML “experts” know the 10% but are ignorant of the 90%. So, by learning core domains during your BTech, you can become sought after as an ML expert who knows the full 100%.
With AI and robots, will engineers become redundant?
Robots have automated many mechanical tasks such as assembly lines in factories and even making dosas in large kitchens. AI (artificial intelligence) and ML have made impressive progress in automating intellectual tasks such as searching for information, writing reports, making medical diagnoses. With computers becoming more powerful by the day, it is natural to wonder whether AI will take over all interesting and useful human activities, including engineering. Will your future be a life of unending leisure or unending boredom?
AI/ML learns by experience. It looks for patterns in a large amount of training data collected from the real-world. Given a new situation, it matches this with some learnt pattern. Thus, AI/ML is well suited to problems for which large amounts of data are available, and where predictable patterns exist. At the cutting edge, there are many areas that are not amenable to AI/ML. One example is Chandrayaan 3. There have been very few missions to the Moon, patterns are yet to emerge. Success of Chandrayaan 3 is critically dependent on real engineers, aided by computers. Another example is Agri-Tech in the era of global warming which is causing unpredictable and radical changes of climate never before experienced. Pattern matching ML cannot design Agri-technologies to work in the face of climate change.
Which companies will hire me for Innovative Engineering?
Most graduates who get engineering jobs join private companies and PSUs. Others work for the government to design and build railways and roads, public buildings, and the IT systems that serve the public. A few work for NGOs and research organisations.
Over the past 20 years, a new option has arisen in India – startups. Today, in India much of the cutting edge innovative engineering R&D is being done in startups. Joining a small startup, you will quickly gain broad practical experience and can take on responsibilities. On the contrary, if you join a large established company, you will be a small cog doing very specific assigned tasks.
If you have a good product idea and are willing to take risks, start your own company to take your product ideas to society. Rather than look for a job for yourself, you’ll create jobs for others. If your product is successful, you’ll gain tremendous satisfaction, and incidentally may make a lot of money.
Parting words
Technology changes so rapidly that even core branch subjects may not be used in your job. The goal of a good BTech is to learn how to learn, to develop an innovative mindset, to be able to identify affordable technology that will solve a problem of society, and to build products that people want to use. Take advantage of curricular and extra-curricular opportunities to gain practical experience in applying technology for the good of society. These foundations will set the stage for a productive and rewarding career as an Innovative Engineer!
A condensed version was published in the Indian Express on 18th August 2023 as “A Lesson from IIT | While software & MBA are common routes after BTech, a super choice is innovative engineering: writes former IIT Mandi Director”
